Five months – a million deaths – into the Great War, the warring armies had settled into the deadly stalemate of trench combat. Bodies littered the No Man’s Land between the opposing trenches; any attempt to retrieve a fallen comrade was likely to be fatal. Modern weaponry, machine guns, artillery, chlorine and mustard gas all made for carnage as never before. The troops hunkered down in the muck and filth; even raising a head above the trough would present an inviting target for a sniper’s bullet from the facing trench.
On the cold and dank Christmas Eve, 1914, Allied troops heard Christmas carols wafting over from the German trenches. The British soldiers answered with songs of their own. In some areas, the trenches were as close as a hundred feet to one another. In places, German soldiers put up decorated trees on their parapets.
Eating fried chicken every year “is what makes Christmas, Christmas.”
Protestantism, Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity — all are active in Japan. But something less than one percent — that’s < 1% — of the Japanese population profess to be Christian. That doesn’t prevent them from celebrating Christmas, and gathering around the table for the traditional holiday repast.
For many in Japan, Christmas dinner is cole slaw, shrimp gratin, triple-berry tiramisu cake and chicken. Not just any chicken, though, but Kentucky Fried Chicken. People line up at their closest KFC on Christmas Eve at for their “Party Barrel,” ordered in advance. KFC Japan does a third of its business at Christmas time.
I lived twenty-plus years in Sonoma County California, Santa Rosa, to be exact. As an emigrant from Oregon, I eventually realized that a crack in the wall or a sticking — and later unsticking — door was the normal. Earthquakes occur literally every day; most are felt only by scientific seismic equipment. In my two decades I felt only several. The most severe woke me early one morning in 2014. That one did most of its damage to the town of Napa, about thirty-five miles away.
Santa Rosa lies just east of the San Andreas Fault line (magnitude 7.6 in 1906 and) and right on top of the Hayward/Rodgers Creek Fault system (magnitude 5.6 and 5.7 in 1969). San Andreas follows the west — SanFrancisco — side of San Francisco Bay; Hayward/Rodgers Creek the east — Oakland — side of the Bay.
Haseltine Pozzi gathers plastic bottle caps, cocktail toothpicks, shotgun shell casings and detergent bottles that wash up on her hometown beach at the town of Bandon on the southern Oregon coast. The debris come from as far away as Asia and Europe. So far, she has fabricated eighty life-size animals, real and imagined: a jellyfish made of golf balls, sharks from flip flops and plastic lighters. Haseltine Pozzi Haseltine Pozzi gathers plastic bottle caps, cocktail toothpicks, shotgun shell casings and detergent bottles that wash up on her hometown beach at the town of Bandon on the southern Oregon coast. The debris come from as far away as Asia and Europe. So far, she has fabricated eighty life-size animals, real and imagined: a jellyfish made of golf balls, sharks from flip flops and plastic lighters.
“I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land.”
– Jon Stewart
The first Thanksgiving was celebrated in 1863. Well, that’s when it became an official holiday in the United States. Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation for the new holiday, partly an attempt to assuage the nation’s deep divide during the Civil War.
The real first Thanksgiving, to celebrate and express gratitude for a bountiful harvest, lasted three days at Plymouth Colony. Over the following decades, Thanksgiving observance became an annual tradition in New England.
Only a few women partook of the Thanksgiving at Plymouth Colony in 1621. That’s because only four of the twenty women who arrived on the Mayflower survived the first winter. By that time, about half of the approximately fifty colonists were children and teenagers.
Native Americans outnumbered colonists by about two to one. Ninety men from the nearby Wampanoag joined the colonists. They soon became BFF with the Pilgrims.
There was no Black Friday shopping after the First Thanksgiving as there were no retail stores. And there was no UPS to deliver Amazon parcels. Nor was there NFL football, as the Pilgrims had no television.
Native Americans had no tradition of formal Thanksgiving; giving thanks was integral to daily life. “Every time anybody went hunting or fishing or picked a plant, they would offer a prayer or acknowledgment.”
Wild turkeys were abundant in the region, but probably not a centerpiece of the feast. Goose and duck and even pigeon were the wildfowl of choice. Eels and shellfish, such as lobster, clams and mussels, likely were on the table. No mashed potatoes and gravy; potatoes, white or sweet, had not yet made their way to North America. Cranberry sauce? It was not until fifty years later that an Englishman reported what resulted from boiling the red berries with sugar.
Thanksgiving at Plymouth colony began the centuries of friendship between European immigrants and Native Americans. America’s manifest destiny even gave inspiration to Adolph Hitler and his lebensraum.
Enjoy your Thanksgiving. If you need a conversation starter at the dinner table, try “How about that impeachment?”
The current occupant of the White House has made danger from our southern border a relentless theme of his pandering to die-hard supporters. In truth, however, the murders, extortion, and kidnappings by Mexican crime cartels continue unabated.
Cartels use violence to compete for control of flow of the product. In the first nine months of 2019, the state Michoacan suffered 1,145 murders, on a pace to exceed the 1,338 killings in 2018. Small towns have formed vigilante groups to provide the protection that law enforcement can’t or won’t. Farmers are arming to protect themselves and their crops. Drivers transporting the produce are regularly hijacked and robbed. All this carnage is the result of crime cartels fighting to dominate the lucrative business of satisfying the insatiable appetite in the U.S.
By now, the astute reader has probably surmised this is about avocados. Spanish conquistadors came to the so-called new world in the sixteenth century with a mission of conquest and plunder. They found a fruit they had never before seen. The indigenous inhabitants knew it by the Aztec name for testicle. The word sounded like “avocado” to the Spanish ear. By the late nineteenth century, avocados had made their way to the U.S. Most people were unfamiliar with the fruit until the 1980s when producers launched a massive marketing campaign promoting avocados as a healthy food.
Avocados are so in demand and prices rising so high that organized crime wants in. Supplying the fruit is as profitable as the illegal drug business and also provides the the infrastructure to launder cash from extra-legal activities.
